Moscow Time

Cassie:
Crossed the border this morning from Kazakhstan to Russia. It was thankfully an uneventful, boring as usual border crossing but nowhere near as tedious as the Mongolian borders were. Again, there was no customs clearance required for the car so it was just a matter of lining up at each side to get our passports stamped. Love those kind of crossings. It's getting the car across the borders that causes all the delays. We started heading towards the border by maybe 8am and got there by 8.30 or somewhere around then. At the Kazakhstan side Graeme was asked to go wait in the car while I was told to walk into the "Frontier Zone" (that's seriously what the sign said at the gate). Yikes, we've never been separated like that at a border before. It was a bit weird and I kept looking back at Graeme and the car as I'm walking across this massive open concrete zone towards a building in the near distance. Turns out the drivers are processed separately from passengers for some weirdo reaso
n. I emerged at the other side of the building looking around for Graeme. All the other passengers I was lined up with kept walking out towards Russia! Stuff that I thought, there's no way I'm walking through those gates until I know Graeme's cool to come through too. Thankfully he was waiting in sight for me so I went and lined up with him while he waited for his passport to be stamped. Then on to the Russian border we went.

Thankfully there was no barge to cross to the Russian side of the river. It's since been replaced with a very handy bridge. Russia seems to like having a half-way point between their borders where the guard checks your visa/passport and gives you a slip of paper to fill out for your arrival. So after lining up for ages there on the bridge while the border guard kept giving the papers to the locals and leaving us waiting like doofus' which is often the case at borders - we often get left to last, obviously put in the "too hard basket" - we were then allowed to go and line up a few kilometres down the road at the actual Russian border crossing point. All up it took maybe 1.5 - 2hrs. We're really not sure because we weren't keeping an eye on the time. Still pretty quick though! And on top of that, we're now on Moscow time so we're six hours behind home now and gained another hour in our day. I thought it would be easier to adjust to the timezone changes than what it has been. I'
m finding I want lunch by 11am, now tomorrow that's probably going to come back an hour to 10am! I'm all out of sync.

Even still, we've stopped at 4pm local time because it feels like 5pm to us. We're not far from our next destination, Volgograd. We stopped at the city of Astrakhan today for a bit of a break after the border. After having a fairly ordinary lunch at a mall of all places, we drove down the street and I yelled "McDonalds"!!!!! Yep, seriously, there was our first Maccas since Australia. Golden arches peaking through the trees and powerlines lining the road. We were interested to know where we would see it again. I was betting on Almaty - KFC was there but no McDonalds. Yes, yes, we had to stop and check it out. As we'd already eaten lunch we thought, let's just try and order a thickshake. Trying my luck I said to the girl at the counter, "Shokolad Shake"? which was met with a positive response. Score! She then grabbed a special menu for us that had many different languages on it with pictures and we pointed to the chocolate and vanilla thickshakes to confirm what we were after.
A thickshake has never tasted so good.

Since then we've been driving on great roads. Such an easy day. Dare I say it....is the most difficult part of our journey over? It's no longer going to take a week or more of bone shattering roads to reach a destination. We seriously could've arrived in Volgograd today without any trouble but we simply chose not to because we have a plan. Our plan has often been to camp within 100km or so from a destination, get up and have some breakkie, drive to the city of destination, search for a hotel and be checked-in by lunch time. Then we're free to go out and get some lunch, chill out for the afternoon and explore all the next day. It makes us feel more rested because we've got a whole heap of extra time out of our stay there. It also means we have more time to explore, especially considering for the first time staying in a major centre we don't need to get anything done with the car. We can actually do the touristy thing unencumbered by chores.

Graeme:

I found credit in the 'split processing' at the KZ border. It enables truck drivers to slip through quickly while busloads of people are processed in another building. I like it.The McDonalds was cool. Cassie is very relieved to have all the hard work behind us, but I'm a little bit lost now, to not have a definite purpose. Our days will now be lazy and unproductive. We could no doubt be in London in a few days if we wanted, so taking our time will be weird.

While I was putting some video together tonight, I remembered an observation. On our way into Almatay, we noticed random sections of stones on the highway, with scratches, like a car had rolled. Weird, but nothing alarming. It wasn't until maybe the 5th occourance of this that it seemed odd. Up the road, sure enough, there was a grader, shaving the high points of the tar off the road. Oh my. Never have I seen that before. A grader, grading a tar road!
Heading towards Astrakhan, we crossed a river on a semi-permanent floating pontoon bridge. Never seen one before in my life!
Today has been crazy windy again. We're stopped in somewhat of a valley which has halved the wind, but gusts are still enough to rock us from side to side.
I've spent my afternoon filing down a reversible screw driver about 5mm so it fits between the car and the cabinate. All done. 35 rubles well spent.
How random are my posts? They are just a loosely strung together single conscious thought.